Justin Cronin - The Twelve

It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained—they all swirled together in the mind like a soup. While half of Dodd’s attention was intently focused on the situation at hand—the detonator in his grip and the presence of his men around him and the walkie clipped to his shoulder, through which Henneman’s command to blow the hole would come—the other half was ricocheting through the chambers of his private self. Only when Henneman gave the signal to explode the bomb would this feeling, a kind of whole-body psychological nausea, abate, igniting his power to act.

The major’s voice crackled through the radio: “Blue Squad, all eyes. Donadio’s going in.”

Something tensed inside him; he felt himself returning to the moment. “Acknowledged.”

It couldn’t happen soon enough.

Seven hundred feet below, in the lightless caverns left behind when sulfide-rich waters had leached upward into the fissured limestone deposits of an ancient reef, Alicia Donadio was advancing on the signal. That this signal emanated from the chip implanted in the neck of Julio Martínez, one of twelve death row inmates infected with the CV virus created by Project NOAH at the dawn of the present age, she had no doubt.

Louise , she thought, Louise .

The moment they’d touched down in the cave, this name had taken ahold of her mind. Which was strange: according to the records they had salvaged from the NOAH compound, Martínez had been sentenced to death for killing a policeman, not the rape and murder of a woman. Perhaps her death had gone unrecorded, or else had never been connected to him. The shooting of the policeman was present also, a flash of violence like a white-hot spark, but within each of the Twelve lay a singular story—the one story that was the true essence, the core of who they were. For Martínez, that story was Louise.

According to her map, two tunnels led from the elevator to individual caves, marked with names suggesting their grandeur. King’s Palace. Hall of Giants. Queen’s Chamber. And, simply, the Big Room. To maintain a line of sight with Peter, and thus stay in communication with the surface, Alicia could go no farther than the junctures at the far end of each passageway. Beyond that, she would be on her own.

King’s Palace, she thought. Somehow, that sounded like him.

“Going left.”

As she proceeded down the passageway, the meter of the RDF leapt, the beeping accelerating in kind. She’d guessed right. The walls pressed around her, shards of some bright substance embedded in their surface glinting under the raking beam of her rifle. There were virals here, a great horde, like buried treasure, Martínez presiding. Alicia could see it all plainly now; the images deepened with every step, taking hold of her mind. Louise, the tightening cord encircling her neck; the precise demarcation of color above and below, her neck milky white, the skin of her face rosy and swollen with blood; the look of astonished terror in her eyes, and the cold finality of death’s approach. It was all as clear as if Alicia had lived it herself, but then something shifted. Now Alicia was experiencing this event in two directions simultaneously. She was looking at Louise while also looking from her. How was this possible? When had she acquired this attunement to the unseen world? Through Louise’s eyes she saw Martínez’s face. A well-groomed man of precise features, silver hair swept back from his forehead to form a delicate widow’s peak. A human face, though not precisely: there was nothing you could call a person behind his eyes, only a soulless vacancy. The pleasure he was taking was an animal’s. Louise was nothing to him. She was an organization of warm surfaces created only for his desire and dispatch. Her name was written plainly on her blouse, and yet his mind could not connect this name to the human person he was strangling in the midst of raping, because the only thing real to him was himself. She felt Louise’s terror, and her pain, and then the dark moment when the woman understood that death was imminent, her life at its end; that she would die without any acknowledgment from the universe that she had existed in the first place, and the last thing she would feel as she departed the world would be Martínez, raping her.

Alicia had reached the juncture, a place called the Boneyard. A strong smell of urine tanged in her nostrils, coating the membranes of her mouth and throat. In the moist air, her breath puffed before her in an icy cloud. The beep of the RDF, steadily accelerating, had become a continuous stream of sound.

She knew then what she intended to do. She had intended it all along. The plan was a cover, an elaborate ruse to conceal her purpose.

She wanted to kill Martínez herself. She wanted to feel him die.

At the elevator, Peter became aware that something wasn’t as it should be just a few seconds before Alicia stepped from his line of sight. There was no rational explanation for this knowledge; it simply came to him out of the stillness, a feeling deep in his bones.

“Lish, come in.”

No answer.

“Lish, can you read me?”

A hiss of static, then: “Stay there.”

There was something unsettling in her voice. A feeling of resignation, as if she were severing a rope that held her over an abyss. Before he could respond, her voice returned: “I mean it, Peter.”

Then she was gone.

He radioed the surface. “Something’s wrong, I’ve lost her.”

“Hold your position, Jaxon.”

Had she said the left tunnel? Yes, the left.

“I’m going after her,” he told Henneman.

“Negative. Stand pat—”

But Peter failed to hear the rest of Henneman’s message. He was already moving away.

At the same time, Lieutenant Dodd had commenced a mad dash down the switchback into the cave. He was unaware that the chain of radio transmission had been broken and that neither Peter nor, by extension, Alicia knew that the bomb at the base of the main entrance had disarmed itself—the first mishap in a cascade of events that would never be fully reassembled to the satisfaction of Command. Somehow—a short in the line, a mechanical defect, a whim of fate—the receiver at the base of the cave had lost contact with the surface. A first-class, A1 screwup if ever there was one, and now Dodd was racing into the mouth of hell.

His first descent had taken fifteen minutes; moving at what counted as a dead sprint down the treacherous, hairpinning pathway, he made it to the bottom in fewer than five. At the edge of his vision he perceived a scuttle overhead, accompanied by a high-pitched squeaking, but in his haste he failed to process this; if Hennemen’s order to blow the package came before he’d made it back out, his team would fire it anyway, killing him in the blast. The only thing on his mind was reaching the bottom, repairing the detonator, and getting back out.

There it was. The receiver. Dodd had left it on a smooth, tablelike boulder situated at the tunnel’s mouth; now it lay on the ground, tipped onto its side. What force had knocked it away? Dodd dropped to his knees, his breath heaving in his chest. Rivers of perspiration spilled down his face. A ghastly stink was in the air. He gently took the device in his hand. The receiver had two switches, one to arm the detonator, another to close the circuit and fire the bomb. Why wasn’t it working? But then he understood that the antenna had come loose, knocked askew in the fall. He withdrew a screwdriver from his pack.

The ceiling began to move.

Alicia noticed the bones first. The bones and the smell, an overpowering stench—rank, biological, like the bottled gas of a grave. She took a step forward. As her boot touched down she felt, then heard, a crunch of bone. The skeleton of something small. The tininess of the skull, its mocking grin of teeth: a kind of rodent? Her field of view widened. The floor was carpeted with the brittle remains, in many places piled knee- or even waist-high, like drifts of snow.